Bangert: Farewell to more than a golf course

Golfers' morning ritual near an end

Jan. 27, 2013

As snow falls outside, coffee and conversation are on the agenda Friday as men who know each other's golf games pretty well gather in the clubhouse at Lafayette Golf Course. They've been meeting most mornings there for a long time, and when that opportunity ends soon, they'll miss it. / John Terhune/Journal & Courier

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Only a few items remain in the clubhouse as a group of regular golfers gather for coffee and conversation Friday, January 25, 2013, at Lafayette Golf Course. The men, who golfed regularly at the course, still meet during the weekdays even though the city has essentially closed the course. 'We're officially disbanded,' said Randy Kraft, one of the group. / John Terhune/Journal & Courier

The guys in the clubhouse — a group of Lafayette retirees sitting around with go-cups of coffee and a plastic container of chocolate chip cookies somebody picked up at Pay Less Super Market on the way in — know that.

“We heard the rumors last spring,” said Randy Kraft, a regular in a golf-and-coffee bunch that has been meeting most weekday mornings — winter, spring, summer and fall — for years in the municipal course’s clubhouse.

“But I don’t think any of us bought it,” said Lee Fuller, a retiree who played 203 rounds at the city course last year.

“We know it’s not coming back,” Kraft said, to a round of shrugged shoulders and shaking heads. “We don’t like it. But we know it.”

Still, there they are, a core of about 25 retirees who come and go between 9 and 11 each morning.

They talk sports — “A lot of 1954 basketball,” says Arni Harlan — and they get around to some local news. And they talk about their golf games, even on a Thursday morning in January when temperatures were sitting in the mid-teens. During warmer days, they’ll get in a round after coffee.

“That’s the big deal for us. We know each other. We know each other’s game,” says Harlan. “But these days, we’re talking about the course. Almost every day about the course going away. It’s weighing on us.”

The Lafayette Parks Department this month closed on a deal that puts Battle Ground Golf Club — once a Lafayette Country Club property and donated to the city by homebuilder John Scheumann — into the hands of a Lafayette Parks Foundation spinoff. (If it sounds a bit confusing, you’re not alone; details about who is running the Battle Ground course, about nine miles north of the Lafayette Golf Course, still are being hashed out.)

The gift gave cover to Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski to pull the plug on Lafayette Golf Course.

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Conceived in 1969, the municipal course was a centerpiece of a riverfront plan that would put parks along the Wabash River, from Harrison Bridge to U.S. 52. On April 27, 1972, the day of the golf course’s groundbreaking, a Lafayette Journal & Courer editorial hailed the vision of parks leaders who saw a string of ball fields, horseshoe courts, trails and “eventually a swimming pool and perhaps even the zoo now housed at Columbian Park.” The pool and the zoo never happened. But most of the rest of it — including the municipal course — did.

“We think people should and will be thanking them for generations to come,” the J&C editorial board wrote.

What wasn’t factored in were the generational floods that had a tendency to wipe out play now and again. Roswarski, now in his third term as mayor, campaigned from the start that he wouldn’t spend a taxpayer dime to keep Lafayette Golf Course open. And through 2012, memberships and greens fees kept the course going. But after floods in 2010 and 2011, Roswarski was looking for an out. Scheumann offered it with the Battle Ground links.

Closing date at Lafayette Golf Club is March 1. The course remains open for play.

“Except for the fact that they took up the pins and filled in the holes,” Lee Fuller said.

“And no carts,” said Al Oakley. “Nine out of 10 of us can’t walk 18 (holes).”

“Why did they have to go and fill in the holes?” Kraft asked. “What can you do with that?”

Also open, for now, is the door to the clubhouse, which sits up a flight of concrete steps across from the first tee.

So the morning bunch is sticking around, not out of protest, really, but out of habit. It’s just what they’ve done for years.

Last week, they did plenty of rationalizing and speculation — about how the Battle Ground deal came about, about the city course’s revenues, about how the city course survived four decades, about the sore spot even minor flooding caused for non-golfing drivers when they looked over waterlogged fairways from up on Sagamore Parkway North, and about what will happen to the property.

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The only sure thing: It won’t be a golf course. Nobody in the clubhouse last week was fooling himself about that.

Of the group, some plan to take their memberships to Battle Ground. Others, whether objecting to the city’s deal or to the distance, are looking at the Elks or the Ravines or another local course.

“The sad part of this is we’ve kind of become a family,” Kraft said. “There’s all these guys who are part of that. We’re all going to be scattered.”

“It’s not going to be the same, I can tell you that much,” Bob Rutherford said.

For now, they keep their morning vigil, with coffee and store-bought cookies. But just like the pins and the holes, they say, the clubhouse won’t be around much longer.

“We’ll come down here one day,” Terry Smith laughed, “and the doors will be locked.”

“That’s when we’ll know we really have to leave,” Harlan said. “And it will be a shame. It really will.”